Search

In this special issue response paper, we pick up from prior discussions to suggest areas where we think policy sociology can benefit from further conversation and research. In particular, we bring together our respective readings and work on policy mobilities, in conversation with the contributions of this special issue, to think further about what policy mobilities and related orientations can bring to the development of policy sociology. We specifically focus our attention on four areas for further conceptual and methodological extension in relation to policy mobilities and related approaches in policy sociology of education: (1) temporality; (2) scale; (3) land; and, finally, (4) methodological diversity. In doing so, we advocate against 'fast' readings of literature from other fields, while emphasizing the value of transdisciplinary work in policy sociology and critical policy studies.

New cognitive infrastructures are emerging as digital platforms and artificial intelligence enable new forms of automated thinking that shape human decision-making. This paper (a) offers a new theoretical perspective on automated thinking in education policy and (b) illustrates how automated thinking is emerging in one specific policy context. We report on a case study of a policy analysis unit ('The Centre') in an Australian state education department that has been implementing a BI strategy since 2013. The Centre is now focused on using BI to support complex decision making and improve learning outcomes, and their strategy describes this focus as becoming 'information centric'. The theoretical framework for our analysis draws on infrastructure studies and philosophy of technology, particularly Luciana Parisi's recent work on automated thinking. We analyse technical documentation and semi-structured interview data to describe the enactment of a BI strategy in The Centre, with a focus on how new approaches to data analytics are shaping decision-making. Our analysis shows that The Centre is developing a cognitive infrastructure that is already creating new conditions for education policy making, and we conclude with a call for research designs that enable pragmatic exploration of what these infrastructures can do.

The use of data to govern education is increasingly supported by the use of knowledge-based technologies, including algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI), and tracking technologies [Fenwick, T., E. Mangez, and J. Ozga. 2014. "Governing Knowledge: Comparison, Knowledge-Based Technologies and Expertise in the Regulation of Education." New York, NY: Routledge]. New forms of datafication and automation enable governments and other powerful stakeholders to draw from the past to construct images of educational futures in order to steer the present. This paper examines the competing conceptions of time and temporality that AI posits for policy and practice when used to anticipate educational futures. We argue that most educational futures are already delineated, and machinic expressions of time are the chronologies, habits, and memories that the educated subject inhabits rather than produces. If resetting educational habits and memories can be an alternative to algorithmic anticipations of education then we believe, paradoxically, that machines may help to reset them by accelerating them.

In this paper, we are interested in the notion of multiple ways of thinking, knowing and transforming life, namely an increasing capacity to intervene in "life" as a "molecular biopolitics," and the changing ways in which "life" can be understood computationally. We identify and speculate on the ways different ideas of life, drawing from humanities, social, life and computing sciences, may impact the ways we think about and know education policy. We focus on key aspects of education policy around self-responsibilisation and choice, new forms of network governance and the move to education data science. The paper examines what is required to understand how advancements in the life and computing sciences may be implemented within educational institutions and organisations, and what political and ethical issues might pertain to the challenges these new advancements bring to educational institutions.

Contemporary education policy involves the integration of novel forms of data and the creation of new data platforms, in addition to the infusion of business principles into school governance networks, and intensification of socio-technical relations. In this paper, we examine how "computational rationality" may be understood as intensifying of an instrumental set of logics in educational governance and decision making, and/or as opening up new explorations around the uncertainty and incompleteness of policy. We suggest that policy rationalities focused on prediction, transparency and data provide the conditions of possibility for Artificial Intelligence to be integrated into, and intensify aspects of, what we term "computational education policy".

The argument of this paper is that new methodologies associated with the emerging field of "policy mobilities" can be applied, and are in fact required, to examine and research the networked and relational, or "topological", nature of globalised education policy, which cuts across the new spaces of policymaking and new modes of global educational governance. In this paper, we examine the methodological issues pertaining to the study of the "movement" of policy. Informed by contemporary methodological thinking around social network analysis and the ethnographic notion of "following the policy", we discuss the limitations of these approaches to adequately address presence in policy network analysis, and the problem of representing speed and intensity of policy mobility, even while these attempt to solve the problem of relationality and territoriality. We conclude that the methodologies of policy mobility are inexorably intertwined with the (constantly) changing phenomena under examination, and hence require what Lury and Wakeford describe as "inventive methods".

In this article, we problematize the establishment of an Africentric Alternative School in Toronto, Canada. We argue that policy, and race and racializations cannot be understood outside of, or immune to, neoliberalism. We contend that policy is a form of racial biopolitics, and race is now produced through neoliberal markets, in conjunction with earlier, liberal categories. We conclude that neoliberalism has produced new forms of racial biopolitics; whereas the state is much less overtly involved in producing and arranging racializations. Instead, neoliberal education policy has transferred or downloaded these forms of racial biopolitics onto populations which are now "free" and "empowered" to produce and maintain variable raciologies.

This article discusses the idea of "difference" in relation to "schools of recognition." The analysis is based on a three-year study that mapped the development of the Africentric Alternative School in the Toronto District School Board. Within, we review the concept of difference and juxtapose it with Gilles Deleuze's concept of "difference-in-itself" as a way to think about educational policy enactments. In order to understand how difference and recognition were enacted--and enacting--we examine how the idea "faciality" positioned eight key people in the development of the school.

This paper examines the epistemologies and ontologies of education policy studies. Our aim is to posit a reinvigoration of policy studies to hedge against undue ossification and co-option of critical policy studies. We do so by arguing for the need to develop new concepts for policy studies using the "posts" (e.g., post-structuralism and post-humanism). The paper aims to create a vocabulary and conceptual contribution to the new ways of undertaking, and new ontologies of, policy studies that are emerging as part of what we term "policy scientificity 3.0."

In this essay, P. Taylor Webb and Kalervo N. Gulson argue that educational policy is a spatial process and that implementation processes in particular produce crucial emergent geographies for policy research. Webb and Gulson describe how emergent geographies are produced when policy "folds" actors through senses and enactments of policy. The idea that policy is sensed and enacted is developed into the concept of a "policy intension" that extends approaches to spatial and, in particular, micropolitical analyses in policy research. Webb and Gulson conclude by discussing cartographical methods that better map the geographies of subjectivity produced through policy intensions. (Contains 89 footnotes.)

In this paper we contend neo-liberal education policy which supports the creation of schooling choices in public education systems is reshaping, conflating and branding ethnicity. We make these points in reference to school choice in Toronto, Canada, and the establishment of an Africentric ethno-centric school. We argue that one of the registers within which education and ethnicity in Toronto operates relates to the conflation of commodification, ethnicity and geography, and that this conflation indicates one of the limits of school choice as a possible way to redress Black student disadvantage. We suggest education policy, which enables the establishment of ethno-centric schools, enters the realm of other debates about race, equity and difference that include the practices of marketing and branding.

Over the past 30 years, there has been virulent urban politics surrounding the provision of government-funded Islamic K-12 schooling in suburban south-western Sydney, Australia. In this paper, drawing on examples of local government opposition to Islamic schools, we argue that race and religion constitute contestations of urban space around the establishment of government-funded Islamic schools. We argue that these particular contestations arise from the changing nature of, and historical continuities between, urban politics, education, Islamophobia and racialisation, in pre-9/11 and post-9/11 Australia. The politics surrounding Islamic schools reveals a coded urban politics that can be understood by paying attention to the ambiance of racialised-religious fears produced--in part--by the policies of government-funding of non-secular education.

This paper draws on ideas of assemblage to examine the contingency and (in)coherence of education policy. The paper is a conceptual and thematic attempt to understand the policy terrain, broadly conceived, pertaining to opposition to the establishment of private Islamic schools in Australia and public Afrocentric schools in Canada. This opposition is located within complex policy terrains relating to multiculturalism, whiteness and race/racism. The paper focuses on the complex racialised politics surrounding education policy initiatives that support marketisation and choice in private and public K-12 schooling--with an interest in what forms of choice are legitimated in and by a racialised education market. The paper concludes that opposition to Islamic and Afrocentric schooling highlights the ambiguity of equity, and the fragility of identity in racialised education policy environments. (Contains 2 notes and 1 table.)

We argue that the concept of a "policy prolepsis" is a category of becoming-policy that actualizes educational practices within spaces of desired policy initiatives and implementations. Policy prolepses represent a range of emergent policy ontologies produced through the interface of educational actors' senses of policy and their estimations of possible outcomes. We use Deleuze's (1990) "logic of sense" to argue that becoming-policy occurs in a pre-conscious space, and that this space is produced politically and used strategically for desired, yet ostensibly unformed, policy outcomes. Educational policy, then, is an ontological activity representing a myriad of policy outcomes through the management of semiotic desires and actors' inferences about these persuasive signs. The paper illustrates the practical idea of policy prolepsis by demonstrating how "policy apparitions" use fear in becoming-policy. Policy apparitions, then, are just one species of policy prolepses that utilize the affect of fear to manipulate educational actors' interpretations. (Contains 2 figures and 10 notes.)

We argue that neo-liberal educational policy has emerged as a proto-fascist governmentality. This contemporary technology relies on State racisms and racial orderings manifested from earlier liberal and neo-liberal practices of biopower. As a proto-fascist technology, education policy, and school choice policies in particular, operate within a racial aesthetics that connects ultra-nationalisms with microfascisms of racialized bodies. We discuss historical examples of liberal school segregation and residential schools in relation to contemporary examples of chartered ethnic-identity schools to illustrate the complexities of proto-fascist education policy.

This paper is concerned with enduring histories and micro-geographies of the (post)colonial Australian nation, played out through contemporary connections between Aboriginality, inner Sydney and educational policy change. This paper traces the "racialization" of space and place in the Sydney inner city suburb of Redfern, including the Aboriginal--"owned" residential area commonly known as the Block; it then outlines aspects of an educational policy change in inner Sydney, specifically the relationship of policy proposals to the positioning of Aboriginal people; and, last, focuses on connecting the notions of Aboriginality and space to educational policy change through Derek Gregory's idea of the "colonial present". It explores how the idea of the "colonial present" as "performance of space" might help to understand the racialisation of the inner city and education policy discourses. It concludes that the "colonial present" is a way of understanding how the "racialisation" of the inner city and education policy discourses can, on the one hand, "reaffirm" deficit views of Aboriginal people as irredeemably "Other" and as "failure", yet, on the other hand, can however precariously mobilize undo colonial enclosures. (Contains 6 notes.)

This paper is part of broader ongoing attempts to demonstrate that shifts in educational policy can be understood as mutually constitutive with the changing nature of contemporary cities, including changes in urban policy. In this paper, the author wants to explore one aspect of these broader attempts, namely the relationships between education policy, globalization, and the notion of the neighborhood. To do this, the author briefly proposes that the neighborhood has been deemed as relatively insignificant within certain discourses of globalization, and then uses this paper to try and argue that the neighborhood retains significance not despite but through neoliberal globalization as played out in the connections between gentrification and education markets. In the first part of this paper, the author identifies how globalization, as pertaining to cities and education policy, has come to be represented by the political economy and philosophy of neoliberalism. In the second part of this paper, the author sketches out the rationalities of neoliberalism relating to education and urban policy, noting for the purposes of illustration the phenomena of education markets and neoliberal urban policy underpinning "third-wave" gentrification. Based on the connections between gentrification and education markets, the author concludes by suggesting that the neighborhood is not "withering" in the face of neoliberal globalization; rather, it is being "reconstituted" according to the logics of the market. It is this idea of reconstitution that also provides the possibility of thinking about the neighborhood through a politics of place, and as such as a site of contestation and potential reinvention.

This paper examines the convergence of urban and education policy in inner Sydney, and posits a politics of place as a useful frame to both understand policy and undertake policy analyses. It reiterates calls for place to be taken seriously in education policy studies, but also proposes that it is equally important to strive for preciseness when using concepts such as space and place. The theoretical component of this paper concerns the intersection of relational notions of place and space with discursive concepts of the identity. The paper then applies these ideas to analyse urban and education policy in inner Sydney, and teases out possible understandings of how schooling may be implicated in a politics of the inner city. (Contains 3 notes.)

This paper explores the spatial dimensions of neoliberalism, in relation to educational policy change in the inner-city of Sydney, Australia. It offers a response to Peck and Tickell's challenge that studies of neoliberalism are often undertaken as discrete macro- or micro-analyses without attention to the links between, and across, these scales. The paper posits the notion of "neoliberal spatial technologies," a bricolage of neoliberalism, governmentality and relational space, to contribute to cross-scalar understandings of neoliberalism in relation to inner-city educational policy change. An adumbrated analysis is presented of the practices surrounding the outcome of educational policy change in inner-Sydney. The paper concludes that these practices, drawing on discourses of neoliberalism and relational space, constitute particular students as possible neoliberal educational subjects. (Contains 7 notes.)

This paper attempts to make sense of a public-private partnership in London's East End. I am interested in how policy directions, in terms of cultural practices, may operate as links between transnational corporations and education provision, and, additionally, how concepts of space and place provide possibilities for different understandings of educational policy change in local instances. I examine the philanthropic practices of a corporation and the practices of schools receiving this philanthropy, and suggest that these are practices of "everyday globalisation" occurring as part of a specific policy direction, Excellence in Cities. (Contains 2 figures and 8 notes.)

Little attention has been paid to the relationship between policy and space in the sociology of education. This paper analyses the relationships between educational policy change, in the form of the "Excellence in cities" policy initiative, and urban change in inner London. I propose, and apply, a framework for a spatialised policy analysis explicitly linking space and policy. I suggest that the intersections of policy, schools, place and space provide new opportunities to explore the interconnection of educational policy change and urban change. I argue that relationships between physical locations and students are significant enabling and disabling factors in neo-liberal educational policy-making. These relationships form what I term the "educational renovation of identity."